The babes in the wood : a Chief Inspector Wexford mystery

With floods threatening both the town of Kingsmarkham and his own home and no end to the rain in sight, Chief Inspector Wexford already has his hands full when he learns that two local teenagers have gone missing along with their sitter, Joanna Troy. Their hysterical mother is convinced that all three have drowned, and as the hours stretch into days Wexford suspects a case of kidnapping, perhaps connected with an unusual sect called the Church of the Good Gospel. But when the sitter’s smashed-up car is found at the bottom of a local quarry–occupied by a battered corpse–the investigation takes on a very different hue. The Babes in the Wood is Ruth Rendell at her very best, a scintillating, precise and troubling story of seduction and religious fanaticism–and murder. The New Yorker In the matriarchy of British crime fiction, Rendell is the weird sister; her novels concern themselves with the more darkly enigmatic corners of motivation. Her tastes in this direction have sometimes outstripped her readers’, and her most recondite tales now appear under the pen name Barbara Vine. Rendell’s Chief Inspector Wexford mysteries are a somewhat friendlier affair, and in this, the nineteenth of the series, fans will be pleased to find the Wexfords staving off a flood in their garden and the Inspector’s clueless elder daughter in trouble again. The plot—a series of puzzles surrounding the disappearance of two teen-agers in the care of a family friend—marches efficiently to its unguessable dénouement while demonstrating Rendell’s grasp of the psychological dynamics of seduction and exploitation which lie at the heart of the case. There hadn't been anything like this kind of rain in living memory. The River Brede had burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley had escaped flooding. Even where Wexford lived, higher up in Kingsmarkham, the waters had nearly reached the mulberry tree in his once immaculate garden. The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles and Sophie Dade, let alone the woman who was keeping them company, Joanna Troy. But Mrs. Dade was still convinced her children were dead. This was an investigation which would call into question many of Wexford's assumptions about the way people behaved, including his own family The mysterious disappearance of two local teenagers and their baby-sitter draws Inspector Wexford into a baffling case involving dark family secrets, violence, a religious cult, adultery, and murder